


Digits

by BeginToFray



Series: (Issues) We've got the kind of love it takes to solve them. [2]
Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-16
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-08-03 03:01:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16317869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeginToFray/pseuds/BeginToFray
Summary: Eve tries to navigate moving on from Niko and moving in with Villanelle. Sort of. She thinks.





	Digits

**Author's Note:**

> So, I think the idea of Eve and Villanelle trying to have a "normal" relationship is an interesting one. Obviously it can't be "normal" but I have been thinking about what it might look like for them and want to have a go at writing some snippets of it. This is the first and hopefully not the last. Yes, there's a time jump and a couple of unanswered questions, but I have left those blanks to be filled in separate stories if people decide they want them.

It hadn’t been easy. Returning to this place, this home she had shared with her husband. Her safe, reliable, Niko, who cooked her comforting Shepherd’s Pies, who did the weekly online shop and sorted the recycling from the general waste and never held a knife to her throat. They had co-existed for years, living their lives next to each other, sleeping next to each other, eating next to each other, occasionally converging to have perfectly adequate and usually satisfying sex before switching off the bedside lamp. And it had been fine. Eve had been fine.

All of that feels a lifetime ago, a parallel universe, a different Eve. It had taken months after returning from Paris to adjust to this new way of living in this familiar space. She sifted through her guilt in the same way she now found herself being the one to divide the plastic from the cardboard of her nightly microwave meals. Marks and Spencer’s Shepherd’s Pie was ready in five minutes, but it wasn’t the same as Niko’s. Generous Niko, who had left their home, the space they had decorated and filled together, and moved to a one bedroom flat in a different part of the city. Eve knew she should be grateful. She had been through a maelstrom of emotions over the previous weeks. She had lost a friend that she realised only too late may have been her closest friend. She had lost her job. Two jobs. She stabbed a woman in the abdomen. She had driven a blade through the skin and tissue of another human. To pack up her home and find a new one on top of all that… Well, Eve isn’t sure she would survive it. Or at least, that was her initial thought. When Niko pulled the door closed behind him, giving her a tight-lipped smile and a promise to check in with her in a few days. When Eve was left in silence in the house, that’s when the wave finally crashed and Eve was submerged. How could she let him leave after everything else? She had been the one to end them. She had forced the wedge between them, she never thought she’d be able to do that, but it turns out she could, and it was easy, it was inevitable, it was unstoppable.

And even now, she doesn’t regret it. Even now, it wasn’t that action that wracked her with the deepest guilt. But still, Niko had done no wrong, and yet there was Eve still in their home whilst he was probably traipsing the nearest IKEA for a new Billy Bookcase. She didn’t miss him. Another building block in the tower of guilt she was building herself. She missed sharing this space with someone, but she didn’t miss Niko. Safe, reliable Niko.

A few weeks into her new single life, after she had finally found the charger for Niko’s prized wireless vacuum cleaner, after she had distinguished the herbs and spices which he had decanted into jars and failed to label, Eve made a realisation. Before the first whiff of Villanelle had wafted into her life she had never experienced passion. Eve and Niko had met through mutual acquaintances at a dinner party, they had become friends and from there they had gradually shifted to friends who shared a house then a bed then a last name. But passion was something the two of them had never shared.

Could that be what had for so long fascinated Eve about the psychology of killers? That level of passion. She had no personal experience of it, had no way of measuring it, of examining it, had never desired anything so strongly that she had to devour it, to exact ownership over it, to end it on her own terms. But this killer, this assassin, had unwavering determination and unnerving focus, her kills showed no hesitation, no doubt, her kills were carried out with cruel enjoyment, with passion. And Eve was consumed. The more she knew, the more she wanted to know. Her fixation shifted from the murders, to the murderer. She had found her own passion. And then she at last met Villanelle and Niko never stood a chance.

It was about two months after Niko closed the door for the final time, that Eve opened it one evening to find Villanelle on the doorstep.

 

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“Where did you grow up?” Eve asked, taking hold of the hand that was slowly tracing circles on her stomach and intertwining her fingers with Villanelle’s. She looked from their joined hands to Villanelle’s face, resting on the pillow next to hers and pointedly avoiding eye contact with Eve.

“Russia.” Villanelle stated simply before rolling towards Eve, letting the bed sheet slip to her waist and slipping a leg between Eve’s, raising herself on her hands to hover low over the older woman.

“Oksana.” Eve warned, watching as those cat-like eyes narrowed momentarily in response, almost too fleeting to notice if you were anyone but Eve.

“Where in Russia?” She pushed. Villanelle sighed.

“A shitty little suburb of Moscow.” She muttered, lowering to push her nose into Eve’s hair, to nuzzle her way into her neck and inhale the scent of that perfume, the perfume that resides in that bottle she once packed into a suitcase, rare butterflies in her stomach at the thought of the other woman opening it. Villanelle smiled against Eve’s neck at the memory of that particular thrill, and lifted her lips to take Eve’s earlobe between her teeth. Eve pulled away slightly.

“With your parents?”

A growl, and a nip to her recaptured earlobe, then a hand lifting from the mattress beside her and Villanelle allowing her weight to rest more fully on Eve, their breasts colliding, fingers combing through her hair and warm lips on her neck.

“What about siblings?”

The fingers in her hair tugged and Eve winced. A matter of weeks back she wouldn’t have risked these questions. She had tiptoed around Villanelle after she had first appeared in the house, still wary of the contract killer watching Love, Actually in her living room. The first time they slept together, Eve had been terrified. Not because it was her first time with a woman. Well, maybe a little of that. But mostly because of the link between death and sex that she so frequently read about in her research. That passion that Eve had seen in Villanelle’s ‘work’, that desire to kill and consume, how would that play out in the bedroom, when Eve was vulnerable and Villanelle was in her element?

As it turned out, their first time had almost not been in the bedroom at all. It very nearly happened in the bathroom. Villanelle had a thing for bathrooms. And Eve _was_ vulnerable and Villanelle _was_ in her element, but that terror that Eve had been harbouring got washed away by this new, gentle and considerate Villanelle, the one who had told her, ‘I know what I’m doing,’ that time in Paris when one had been thinking about sex and the other about stabbing. It was Eve, after all, who proved the most murderous in the bedroom. Villanelle was a worshipper. She had no intent to harm. To bite, maybe, but then to soothe. That was her style.

“Do you have brothers and sisters?” Eve brought a hand to Villanelle’s back and ran her nails lightly down it and then back up again.

“Well, I’m not one for sharing, so what do you think?” Villanelle replied tersely, diverting her lips to start a dance across Eve’s collarbone. Eve rolled her eyes at the dual meaning in that particular statement.

“I don’t know, Oksana, that’s why I’m asking you.”

Villanelle shifted up slightly, she finally looked Eve in the eyes, holding her gaze for a long moment, before flitting her eye line towards Eve’s lips instead and leaning in to capture them. Eve allowed the kiss; she always allowed Villanelle’s kisses. She relished them in fact. She relished the softness and the lack of scratchy moustache hairs, and she revelled in the bolts of warmth that Villanelle’s attentions sent straight to the very core of her. Villanelle traced her tongue along Eve’s lower lip and the older woman let out an unintentional groan. She felt Villanelle’s lips spread and tighten in a victorious smile against her own, before Villanelle angled her head to deepen the kiss, pushed Eve’s knees apart with her own and settled fully into the cradle of her hips, the sheets a tangled mess between them.

“Did you have pets?” Eve asked, wrenching her lips from Villanelle’s.

“Jesus, Eve!” Villanelle exploded. “I’m trying to fuck you here.” She lifted herself up again and glared at Eve, exasperation clear in her wide eyes.

“I know, Darling, and it’s lovely. But I want to know more.” Eve could feel the tension coiling up in the woman above her and knew that whilst the assassin in her sheets was not going to turn a blade on her, she still had a quick temper and the ability to wound with words. Eve’s hand resumed its caresses of Villanelle’s smooth back.

“You always want to know more. You can never just accept me as I am.” The caresses were not calming anything this time. And suddenly Eve was tired of trying. Her questions weren’t unreasonable. She had known these things about the last person she was in a relationship with. As far as Eve was concerned she had been very accepting of Villanelle. She hadn’t turned her over to the authorities, for example.

“Accept you? You practically live here! You sleep in the bed my husband built. I never ask about the blood on your boots or the box of fucking bullets in my bathroom cabinet!” Eve gave a light shove on Villanelle’s shoulders and swung her legs over the edge of the bed.

“Your husband built this bed?” Villanelle asked quietly.

“Yes!” Eve let out, louder than even she had expected. She stood from the bed in question and walked naked to the wardrobe where her robe hung. It was a silk robe that Villanelle had bought for her, of course. Villanelle remained silent for a moment.

“We should get a new bed.”

Eve froze with one arm into her robe before pulling it out again harshly and throwing the robe crumpled back into the wardrobe. She grabbed a pair of designer jeans from the floor and heaved them up her legs, hoping to God they were hers and not Villanelle’s, and sighing in relief as they fitted over her hips and she buttoned them swiftly, ignoring the alien feel of them without underwear beneath.

“What are you doing now?” Villanelle asked lazily, as though speaking to an impetuous teen. She was sitting up, still entirely naked and entirely un-self-conscious atop the nest of sheets.

“I’ve got to get out of here.” Eve grunted from inside the large sweater she had pulled from the back of the wardrobe and was now wrestling over her head. It was Niko’s sweater, she realised a second too late.

Villanelle sat up straight as Eve’s head popped out of the sweater and she adjusted her wild hair as best she could and started towards the bedroom door.

“You’re being very rude. We were in the middle of something.” Villanelle stated, and Eve let out a harsh laugh.

“Yes. I was in the middle of trying to get to know you, and you were in the middle of trying to fuck me to avoid questions.” Eve shook her head disbelievingly.

“It’s better than lying to you. You get to have some fun.” Villanelle explained. Eve’s eyes widened and she took a step towards the bed. If Villanelle thought Eve had a knife concealed in that over-sized ugly sweater then she may have backed away at this point.

“How about you don’t fucking lie to me and just answer the questions? Maybe I don’t want to fuck someone I don’t even know anymore. It’s been weeks, Oksana. I don’t even know your fucking phone number!” Eve ranted, hands gesturing wildly.

For a second, the two women simply stared at each other, Eve hovering in the doorway with desperation in her eyes. If Villanelle would give her something, any snippet of information, then she was could be talked down. Villanelle kept her gaze locked on Eve’s, her face blank and, as usual, giving nothing away.

“That sweater makes you look fat.” Villanelle said, raising her eyebrows at Eve.

Eve turned on her heel and slammed the door behind her.

 

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It took Eve about forty minutes to stop fuming, to emerge from a tube station and find herself at the river. The rolling Thames, as grey and threatening as the sky above it, Eve walked the south bank with no destination in mind, her thoughts now tumbling more slowly. What was she doing?

She was living in her marital home with a Russian assassin twenty years younger than herself. It was a Sunday afternoon and she had just stormed out of the house because her young lover wouldn’t tell her if she had had any childhood pets. She was freezing cold, walking around central London in her husband’s sweater, jeans bought by her girlfriend – girlfriend? – and no underwear. She was wearing Villanelle’s boots because they had been by the door as she charged out. She glanced at them now, and swiftly decided not to further investigate the rusty brown stain on the left one.

It had been fifteen years since her last, but Eve really wanted a cigarette. She stopped and glanced around, spotted a young man in a leather jacket walking her way, with a lit cigarette hanging from his lips.

“Excuse me,” Eve touched the young man’s elbow as he passed, “Could I… Do you… Can I have a cigarette please?”

“Uh, sure…” He fished a packet from his pocket and pulled a cigarette out halfway for Eve. She took it gratefully and the young man began to walk off.

“Wait!” Eve called. “And uh… a light?”

This time he didn’t say anything, just held up a lighter for Eve, waited as she lit her cigarette and nodded as he walked off. Eve didn’t notice the slightly baffled look he threw over his shoulder after a few paces. She was now leaning on the embankment wall and looking out over the river. Eve took a deep drag on her cigarette and exploded into a coughing fit. Fifteen years was a long time, and she had forgotten the harshness of smoke in her lungs. If she wasn’t feeling ridiculous before, she certainly was now.

She hadn’t been happy with Niko. She knows that now. She had been content, and that would have been fine for the rest of her days. Would have been fine if nothing else had happened. If Villanelle hadn’t happened. If Eve hadn’t discovered passion and excitement, and many other things that would threaten to make her blush. She had what she wanted, didn’t she? Villanelle had somehow forgiven her for ramming a blade in her gut. She had crossed the channel and walked right on into Eve’s life seemingly intent on simply invading it, not ending it. Eve was sharing her space with someone again. It was unpredictable and wonderful and if she didn’t think about her live-in lover’s occupation then it had become a funny sort of perfect. Eve should be happy with that, shouldn’t she?

But there was Villanelle and there was Oksana and Eve wanted both. Since the very beginning, her appetite for knowing this mysterious woman only grew, and it remained insatiable. What made Oksana into Villanelle? If Eve had thought it through, then she would have come to the conclusion that the transition was unlikely to have been borne out of a pleasant childhood with loving parents, squabbling siblings and a golden fucking retriever. And perhaps in their bed – their bed? Niko’s bed? – hadn’t been the best place to pick at that particular scab.

Eve took a gentler inhale on her cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly, watching it curl and whip away on the breeze. Villanelle needed time. She had already begun to shift. She was like a wild animal, slowly learning to trust a human. Eve was trying to domesticate her because that’s what she was used to, but it’s not what Villanelle was used to and perhaps Eve needed to respect that. She took another pull on her cigarette and held the smoke in for a moment before releasing it in a cloud this time. She eyed the cigarette and then flicked it, watching as it spun and losing sight of it before it hit the water below. She felt calm now. She looked absurd, but she felt calm. She was ready to go home. She only hoped she wouldn’t find it empty. Villanelle had a habit of vanishing.

 

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It was dark by the time Eve arrived home. But there was a light on in the living room and there was noise coming from the large television that had appeared in the corner a few weeks ago, and Eve felt a sense of relief wash over her. Villanelle was sitting in the middle of the sofa, her feet on the coffee table and a bowl of popcorn in her lap. She was wearing a sweater of Eve’s that she frequently claimed was ugly and a large pair of woollen socks. Her legs were bare, and Eve couldn’t see, but had to assume Villanelle was wearing underwear. Eve dropped her house keys onto the table.

“You’re still here.”

“You took my shoes.”

“You have about twenty pairs of shoes here.”

Villanelle just shrugged, and crammed a handful of popcorn into her mouth. Eve edged nearer to the sofa and Villanelle watched her from the corner of her eye until she sat next to her, their legs touching.

“I’m sorry.” Eve said softly leaning back against the sofa cushions and noticing that Villanelle was, once again, watching Love, Actually. Villanelle hummed, but didn’t say anything, she shifted slightly and Eve watched as she produced a slip of paper from somewhere up the sleeve of Eve’s sweater that she was wearing. She handed it to Eve, without taking her eyes from the television.

“What’s this?” Eve asked unfolding the paper.

“My phone number.”


End file.
